Santorum doesn't expend a great deal of ink on the fundamentals of limited government theory...because for him they are Axiomatic. He is starting from Goldwater and Reagan's precepts and elaborating on them since we are still dealing with the fact that their ideas are not fully implented yet. We are still left with the FDR/LBJ/Nixon/Carter/Xlinton edifice. GWB has done nothing to dismantle it. And Santorum is clearly not a fan of GWB's budgetary principles. So all we can say of Rauch is:
This piece is ludicrous.
You can talk all you like about "limiting government". But government does what society asks it to do because it can no longer do it.
We live in a society of two child families. A two child family cannot take care of its elderly or nurse its sick the way 5+ child families used to. We have a two child family culture because we have an individualistic society in which families do not have more children than they can afford to send to college.
Only people who buy into "be fruitful and multiply" have more than 2 children. It requires a traditional, religious culture, not an individualistic one, to have a birthrate large enough that people no longer look to the state to protect them from the predictable hardships of life, sickness and old age. You cannot put the cart before the horse. You must have a religious, traditional culture of large families before you can even think about dismantling middle class welfare.
To have a 1900 state, you have to have a 1900 culture and society. Libertarians never see that.